Day 340 - Eritrea, In The Beginning

by  e r j k p r u n c z y k 

My acquaintance with Eritrea goes back to my first assignment with the State Department in Stuttgart. A young woman from Eritrea who had somehow gotten to Germany applied for a visitor visa to the United States while I was working in the Visa Section of the Consulate. Eritrea was still part of Ethiopia at that time, but she made it clear that she was not Ethiopian. She was Eritrean. Eritrea was fighting a civil war with Ethiopia and did not gain its independence from Ethiopia until 1993.

She didn't have a residence permit for Germany, so it appeared that her goal was to get to the U.S. permanently. For that, she needed an immigrant visa. But even if she had a family member who could sponsor her application for an immigrant visa, it was unclear just how long she would be able to remain in Germany. It was unlikely that she would get permission to stay in Germany, so I asked when she planned to return to Eritrea. It was clear she did not plan to return, but it wasn't clear how she got out as her passport did not have exit and entrance stamps that showed the whole story. So I asked her, but at that point she just stopped talking. She seemed frightened. No amount of reassurance that I would not report what she said to anyone else, that I just needed to understand her situation, could convince her to tell me.

I declined her visa application. But that wasn't the last time I saw her. The next time she appeared, she applied for a fiancee visa. A fiancee visa is almost the same as an immigrant visa, but is issued before the marriage. When a fiancee visa is issued, the wedding must take place within 90 days, after which the fiancee visa recipient could apply for permanent residency. It would have been a very quick solution to getting her to the United States.  However, the applicant had never met the American who had petitioned for her to come to the U.S. so I could not issue the fiancee visa.

But she came back again. It was a few months later, and this time she brought in the American who had petitioned for her fiancee visa to prove that they had since met. Fortunately for her, they hadn't just rushed off to get married in Germany because if they had, she would have had to remain in Germany while he returned to the U.S. to petition for her to join him on an immigrant visa, a process that would have taken many months. 

From that story, I learned only that one person was desperate to get out of Eritrea and perhaps equally desperate to get into the U.S. But I was pretty certain others from Eritrea were equally desperate because of the civil war.

By the time I landed in Eritrrea, the country had been independent for more than 10 years. I naively thought that independence meant freedom. Maybe it did for the political leaders, but the people of Eritrea still lived under an autocratic ruler, just a different one.

Eritrea had been independent at an earlier time, although it also had been subject to Italian and British rule before it was absorbed into Ethiopia in 1951. The fact that the United States played a role in getting the United Nations Resolution that led to the federation of Eritrea into Ethiopia at that time has often been cited by the Eritrean government in its many complaints against the U.S.

Independence definitely does not equal freedom. I was about to see just how far from freedom life in Eritrea was.

Day 327 - Christmas Around the World, Part I

I always found a way to celebrate Christmas while I lived overseas, although I often had to do without the little things that I associate with that holiday. Little things like Christmas trees. And lights. And lefse. And while my biological family was not with me for any of my around-the-world Christmases, I usually had a stand-in family until I got my own family - Alex and his son.

Iranian Christmas Tree

My first Christmas in Iran was colder and bleaker than many I had spent in Minnesota because my roommate Annie and I had moved from our second floor apartment above our landlord's home to a third floor unit in a building with nine apartments. That apartment had central heating, but that didn't mean it was warm. In spite of all that I had learned in science classes about heat rising, the heat in that building seemed to hover right around the ground floor.

There was a doctor's office in the ground floor and we understood that the doctor wanted the temperature in his office to be comfortable for his patients. I don't recall what his specialty was, but it seemed to Annie and me that his patients must not have had to take off many clothes to be examined. Our apartment was so cold that I used to keep my clothes on the top of the bedclothes so I could drag them under the covers in order to dress to avoid having to put my feet onto the cold floor.

We had no tree that first year. Instead, a small evergreen plant that a boyfriend who turned out not to be so reliable had given me served as our holiday tree.

The second year in Iran, Christmas coincided with the most inexplicable Shi'ite holiday of them all, Ashura. That meant everything was closed for Christmas: restaurants, theaters, night clubs, everything that might be construed as providing entertainment. We could get together in our homes, but we had to be careful not to be overheard. I also learned about the difference in the Orthodox calendar which is about two weeks behind our calendar. So while Christmas coincided with Ashura for us, there was another opportunity to observe Christmas just around the corner, on January 7.

I spent that Christmas with my surrogate family - Patty, Cheryl, Neal, Shirley, and Maureen. There may have been others there as well, but those five were the core for me. We exchanged gifts, but mostly for the fun of watching one another open them. For example, Patty received a bottle of White Out because we all knew her alter-ego, Patty Black, who appeared after a few drinks and whose tongue had an acid edge to it. But we loved both Patties and had a good laugh when she opened the package.

by  Resident on Earth 

The following year, I was in Romania where it seemed inevitable that all the foreign lecturers would go somewhere else for Christmas and New Year. Since two of my friends from Iran, Bill and Shellagh, were living in Paris, that is where I headed. Some may claim April is Paris is the best time to be there, but Christmas in Paris is pretty magical.

I saw the Eiffel Tower, Cathédrale Notre Dame, la Basilique du Sacré Coeur de Montmartre, Musée du Louvre, Château de Versailles, Centre Georges Pompidou, Arc de Triomphe, the Champs-Élysées, all on the list of the top 10 must-see sights of Paris. Another couple from Iran joined us for Christmas dinner, extending my pleasant experiences of Iran and helping me push away the unpleasant memories.

Next stop: Germany. While Christmas in Paris was magical, Christmas markets in Germany are enchanting. They are a little like a carnival fair with plenty of hawkers selling items such as scarf rings, hand-held vacuum cleaners, and silver polish, but there are so many wonderful and colorful things to see and food and drink to smell and consume that the commercial side isn't distracting. Since my household effects hadn't arrived yet by Christmas, I didn't have my usual Christmas decorations to put up in my apartment. After a couple of afternoons wandering through the Christmas market, I decided I had to have a tree. I bought a very small pine tree and then stocked up on wooden ornaments from the market to fill it with jewels.

by  mv_touristboard  I also was introduced to the Wichtel, Germany's secret Santa, although sometimes a Wichtel is known to play tricks, not just give gifts. My Wichtel must have known my household effects hadn't arrived because I got more and more ornaments for my tree throughout the days leading up to Christmas, My second Christmas in Germany was spent in England where friends from Romania, Gayle and Roger, lived. In addition to getting an introduction to life in England, Gayle and Roger introduced me to their other houseguest, a teacher from China on an exchange program in England for a few months. Having her with us as we traveled in their neighborhood was a good balance for my observations. Every time I noticed something, such as how small many of the homes in England are, she observed the opposite from her Chinese viewpoint, that homes in England are large. She helped keep things in perspective.

Roger let Gayle and me pick out the Christmas tree that year. We got one just the right height, but it had a kink not noticeable from the angle we looked when picking it out, making it lean over ever so slightly.

PJ and Heather in front; Sandra, Zofia, Pete,
and Marge in back

My first Christmas in Doha was spent with my surrogate family in that country: Pete, Zofia and their children PJ and Heather, and Marge. We played Pictionary and I couldn't believe how well those kids understood one another without words. PJ would scribble something on a paper and Heather would announce the word on the first guess. If they were cheating, I never figured out how.

By the second Christmas in Doha, I had met Alex, but he flew back to England to be with his son. I knew they planned to travel through Scotland so when I heard about Pan Am Flight 103 crashing over Lockerbie, I was frantic to know where they were. Alex didn't think to call to let me know they were fine, although on Christmas Day when I was at the house of our friends Alex and Jean, he called five times just to be sure I was OK and we were having a good time.

That's what happens when a telephone guy goes on vacation - he makes phone calls home all the time, except when I want to hear from him.

Day 205 - Vernal Bear Day

Before I left Minneapolis to begin my Foreign Service career, I was introduced to a personal holiday by my friend Thom, Vernal Bear Day. Thom and his ex-wife created the holiday for themselves since they enjoyed the memory of children's holiday activities such as exchanging Valentines in February, looking for Easter baskets in March or April, and exchanging May baskets, but they had no children to share those holidays. Vernal Bear Day was the solution. On a Sunday in the spring, not necessarily on a fixed date (it was, after all, a personal holiday) they would exchange Vernal Bear Day baskets.

The rules for what to include in a Vernal Bear Day basket were simple:

Vernal Bear Day in Germany

• There must be bears.
• There must be chocolate.
• There may be flowers.
• No bunnies are allowed.
• Chickies and peeps are optional.

When Thom and his ex split up, Thom and I observed the holiday while I was still in the U.S. Once I arrived in Germany and the space shuttle blew up, I began to share the holiday with my colleagues.

The first year in Germany, a friend from Romania, Gayle, was in town the weekend I had had invited my friends to celebrate. Together, Gayle and I created a basket for everyone and we hid them around my apartment. My guests arrived for brunch and we took turns looking for the hidden baskets.

Vernal Bear Day Loot in Qatar

The next year, since I now had photos to show everyone what a Vernal Bear Day basket looked like, I invited friends, some from the year before and some new, and this time asked that they bring a basket to hide, but with the additional twist that each basket should be brought in disguise or hidden in a bag or box. That became the pattern in the future.

The first spring in Doha, I invited all the Americans at the embassy to a Vernal Bear Day brunch. All the Americans, including the ambassador and his wife. I found birthday party invitations that had a bear on the front with the words, Come to a Bear Day Party which I modified with a caret between a and Bear to add Vernal above. I gave everyone the rules and looked forward to how the baskets turned out.

One of the guests was an extra - a sailor in town to make arrangements for an upcoming ship visit. He was one of those TDYers we included in all our socializing and entertaining. He won the most creative basket award, if I had decided there would be such an award. His basket consisted of a box of alfalfa sprouts as the Easter grass substitute with a stuffed teddy bear and chocolate bars on top.

That first Vernal Bear Day in Doha was most memorable because of the ambassador's reaction to it all. He kept mentioning that he had never heard of the holiday before. I must have told him ten times that no one had heard of it before because it was a personal holiday. It never seemed to sink in.

That wasn't the last time the ambassador and I experienced a failure to communicate.

Day 192 - Being Four Years Old Again

Slightly older than 4-year-old neighbors from Dudrey Court

Many times in my life I have said that I thought four years old was the perfect age - or at least it was my perfect age. At four years old, I hadn't started school yet, so I didn't have any routine to my life besides wanting to get up earlier than my parents and not wanting to go to bed when they told me to. I didn't have any homework to do. I only had one sibling to have to share anything, including my parents' attention. And I found it very easy at that age to meet someone new and become best friends with him or her instantly.

I was four years old when Margaret Simonitsch's family moved back to the house across the street from ours. They had lived there before, but then I was too young to have any memories of them. I still remember clearly the image of seeing blonde Margaret on the driveway of the house across the street, looking towards our house. She wasn't the first person in the neighborhood about my age, but she was the closest one to our house. And I knew right away that she was going to be my friend.

We often took drives on Sunday afternoons when Dad wasn't working a shift that had him at the Power Plant all day. And when we took those drives, I don't think even Mom knew where we were going to end up. Sometimes it would be at one of Mom's or Dad's sibling's homes on the farm. But sometimes we would drive somewhere else, like to Detroit Lakes, where high school friends of Mom or Dad lived. I recently learned that Dad's sister Myrt and her family lived in Detroit Lakes for a year or so. Perhaps that was the reason Dad drove that far from town just to visit. And I remember meeting another four-year-old girl in the neighborhood on one of those trips. I don't remember her name. I don't remember if she was a relative or the daughter of a friend. Perhaps she was just the child of a neighbor. But I remember being very comfortable playing all afternoon with her. Or maybe it was just an hour. An hour today seems so much shorter than an hour seemed at four.

Maybe it is because I have such good feelings about being four years old that I was so comfortable being around four-year-olds in Germany. Or maybe it is that I am an introvert who is more comfortable talking with just one person at a time and four-year-olds are a good audience for conversation in a foreign language. I had three experiences in three different cities with four-year-olds. And each brought back the feeling of being four myself.

The first was when my colleague Judith and I went to Berlin on a Thanksgiving weekend tour organized by the Armed Forces Morale and Welfare organization at Patch Barracks. In addition to all the site-seeing that was built into the trip, I took the opportunity to visit a couple I knew there whom I had met at a South St. Paul Romanian restaurant several years before. Martin* had been a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota that semester and his girlfriend, Marina*, was from Romania. They met in Berlin when Marina and her ex-husband arrived there after having driven across the border into Hungary and then Austria and finally into Germany. Marina and her husband saw that they had the opportunity to get out of Romania and while they knew they no longer had the basis for a relationship, they decided to make this last trip out of Romania together, after which they split up and never saw one another again.

Martin had heard about the Romanian restaurant in South St. Paul so when Marina joined him in Minnesota for his last few weeks, he took her there. It turned out to be an evening when the Romanian dance ensemble I was part of performed at the restaurant. After we concluded our performance, we always grabbed a few patrons at the restaurant to get them dancing with us. Marina and Martin joined us gladly, and that was the beginning of our acquaintanceship.

A few days after we met them at the restaurant, they called my ex-husband and me to ask if we would join them for dinner. They had a purpose for the invitation. They were hoping we could help Marina find a place where she could get a quick divorce. The German government wouldn't allow them to marry until she could produce a divorce decree. And she couldn't get divorced in Germany without her husband's involvement in the process, but she had no idea where he was. She knew that if she could get a divorce somewhere in the world, and then she and Martin could marry there, the German government would acknowledge their marriage.

Zephyrius and Amalyswintha

We weren't able to help them with that problem, but I stayed in touch with them, exchanging Christmas cards each year, even after John and I had gone through our own divorce. By the time I was assigned to Germany, I knew they had traveled to Denmark where Marina got her divorce and they were able to marry. They now had two children whose names I will never forget: Zephyrius and Amalyswintha. When I learned I was going to Germany, I got in touch with them and Judith and I made our way to see them during our Thanksgiving holiday.

Amalyswintha was still an infant, but Zephyrius was about four. While both Martin and Marina spoke very good English, Zephyrius only spoke German. Since my German was not much better than a fourth graders', I was able to converse quite well with Zephyrius. I was very interested to see how much his language skills had developed, so I asked him a lot of the W-questions - who, what, when, where, and why. I knew that children develop the concepts of who and what before they learn when and where and that why is a more complex concept. During our conversation, I observed that Zephyrius had wer (who), was (what), wenn (when) and wo (where) down pat. But when I asked him questions that began with warum, the German equivalent of why, he usually just repeated what he had last told me.

When Marina told Zephyrius it was time for him to go to bed, he looked up with a sad look on his face and said, "Aber wir spielen" (but, we are playing). I was reminded of my four-year-old self in that moment.

The next four-year-old was the son of a couple Judith knew who lived in Wiesbaden. John* was American and his wife Ulrike* was German. They were following all the advice at the time about one parent speaking consistently in one language and the other consistently in the other language in order to help their son, Jacob*, master both languages. So John spoke with Jacob in English and Ulrike spoke with him in German. In this case, I started asking Jacob the same set of questions I had asked Zephyrius, but in English. And I noticed the same thing. Jacob could answer the who, what, when, and where questions, but why questions stumped him. I decided both Zephyrius and Jacob must have barely turned four because between 3 and 5 years old is when most children begin to ask their parents all those why questions, so famously followed up with yet another why? Or maybe it is that they learn how to ask the question without necessarily having mastered the concept so they ask again, trying to figure it out. After all, once the first why question has been answered, the answer to the next one usually changes. How easy is that for a child to understand?

After we had a meal, the five of us - John, Ulrike, Judith, Jacob, and I - were standing in the kitchen talking and Jacob was trying to get his parents' attention when Ulrike suggested to him in German that he should go and play. He responded "OK," with a smile and then came to me and took my hand to bring me with him to play. That just about melted my heart.

My final four-year-old experience was when Pradeep and Parvani invited me to join them and several of their German friends at a celebration of the Indian holiday of Diwali, the festival of lights. In India, Diwali is a family holiday, but Pradeep and Parvani not only were far from their families, their families were still not happy with their marriage, so it is likely they would not have been welcome in the home of either of their parents anyway. So they invited all the people who had become important to them, and their children, to celebrate Diwali with them.

There were lots of children. I had spent several evenings with Pradeep and Parvani, but never with so many other adults. I think that is why I gravitated toward the children. In this event, there wasn't just a single four-year-old child for me to talk with; there were many children of a variety of ages. So I sat down on the floor with them and asked them questions - not the series of W-questions this time, but questions to get them talking about what was important to them. Some of them seemed bored to be at this event they didn't understand. I think some of the older children thought they might shock me with their answers - I'm certain some of their parents might have been shocked, if the children were honest enough to tell their parents the same thing. But I slipped right into being my 4-year-old or 8-year-old or 12-year-old self, albeit a much more confident version of those younger inner children, and kept the conversation going throughout the evening. If they mentioned something I didn't know anything about, I asked them to tell me more. If they mentioned something I knew something about, I told them what I thought, careful never to mix in any judgment in either my words or my intonation.

I don't want to be four years old again, or even 44 years old. But I hope I'll never stop being able to remember what it was like to be four.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 190 - What Does Citizenship Have To Do With Grades?

Image of German flag by fdecomite, via Flickr.com

One of the most interesting American Citizens Services cases I handled was when a father brought his 15-year-old son to the consulate for him to renounced his American citizenship. The father had renounced his citizenship many years before. The mother was German. And the boy was born before 1975 when the only claim to German citizenship was through the father and not the mother. Exceptions included cases where the parents were unmarried (in which case German mothers could pass on citizenship) or where the German mother applied for the child to be registered as German on or before 31 December 1977. His mother had not applied for him by the deadline which meant the boy was American and only American.

The boy couldn't renounce his citizenship because he was not yet 18. If he had filled out the application to renounce his citizenship and sworn, or affirmed, that he chose willingly to give up his American citizenship, he could have later claimed the renunciation was invalid since he was still a minor at the time. Maybe that's what I should have done - allowed the boy to renounce his citizenship because his father insisted and then explained to the boy that he could take back his renunciation later. But I was still learning how to be a bureaucrat in those days. I had spent a lot of time learning all about the rules and I felt I was responsible for following them.

So first I talked with the father. I explained that his son wasn't old enough to renounce his citizenship. The father responded that his son wasn't doing well in school because he couldn't speak German. The father believed that because his son was an American and not a German, he would continue having problems learning German as well as other subjects.  He thought his son's renouncing his American citizenship was important. The father said he himself had experienced similar problems before he renounced his American citizenship. At work, he didn't do well because he didn't speak German. Once he renounced his American citizenship and became a German citizen, his life at work improved.

I could understand that his father's life probably improved once he became a German citizen. But I wasn't able to make the connection to his claim that his son wasn't doing well in school because he didn't speak German well and that was because he was still an American citizen.

Maybe there were some undercurrents of prejudice at work in the boy's school. Looking back to my elementary school days, I recall years when our classrooms had more than the normal number of students at the beginning of the year and then again at the end of the year because of the children of the migrant workers from Texas who spent May through September in the Red River Valley working in the sugar beet fields. Because those students were in our schools for such short times, it would be easy to understand the teachers not spending much time on them. After all, they would be gone soon. In fact, I can only remember one of my elementary grade teachers making any effort to integrate the migrant children into our activities. Maybe I wasn't paying attention the other years. But I don't think so.

Maybe the teachers in the boy's school thought he was just like the other American children, dependents of American service members, who might be there for a full year, but eventually would be gone. Maybe I should have paid more attention to the father's pleas on behalf of his child.

But I was a bureaucracy neophyte. So I explained to the father that it wasn't fair for him to decide on behalf of his son, that only his son could decide whether to renounce his citizenship, and that his son was too young to do so now. When his son turned 18, he could come on his own to renounce his citizenship. Or, at 18, his son could decide to travel to the U.S. to study, work, and live, something he might not be able to do if he didn't still have his American citizenship.

His father then insisted that the German authorities had advised him that it would be better if everyone in the family had the same citizenship. The boy's younger siblings, born after January 1, 1975, were dual nationals, holding German citizenship through their mother and American citizenship through their father at the time of their birth. The boy was the only one stuck in the middle, with only American citizenship.

I then talked with the boy without his father present. He had difficulty speaking either English or German, so I then had a better notion of the challenges he faced in school. And it felt all the more like his father didn't have a realistic grasp on the situation, somehow hoping that solving the citizenship dilemma would carry over to solve the boy's educational challenges.

In the end, father and son left the consulate that day, probably not convinced that I had helped them in any way.

Day 189 - In Search of a Bad Restaurant in Germany

Image of a German restaurant by relexa hotels,
via Flickr.com

Germans have a lot to teach us about taking pride in our work. In addition to Gymnasium and University studies, Germans had options for more vocationally oriented training. My impression was that every German who enrolled in any type of educational program - university level, vocational level, or evening adult classes - was proud to have the opportunity and proud to master the topic or skills.

Any number of young German women who applied for non-immigrant visas to travel to the U.S., for example, were studying Gastfreundschaft, hospitality, in order to move into positions as Gastfreundschaft-Arbeiterinen, the feminine plural of hospitality worker. I didn't get the impression that any of them would have ever described their chosen career as being just a waitress or just a reception desk clerk, as I felt my time working in an office to be just a secretary. They would start out in those entry level positions, with no complaining or grumbling. They had their eyes on something bigger and better down the road. And it was understandable that those studying the field of hospitality would want to experience how guests in other countries were treated, likely the reason that so many of them wanted to travel to the U.S.

To test out my theory that all Germans took greater pride in their work than I thought Americans did, I decided I would dedicate my time in Germany to the search for a bad restaurant, one that exhibited poor service or poor food quality or even the ultimate - bad food and bad service.

There were plenty of restaurants in Stuttgart including a Hungarian restaurant, just across the street from the consulate, that served the most delicious goulash I have ever had. There was a magnificent Chinese restaurant that we got approval from the boss so that all of us in the visa section could go there together for a late lunch to celebrate someone's birthday or farewell. In that restaurant, I met lychee fruit. They served lychee fruit over vanilla ice cream for dessert which I don't recall ordering - I think it was the restaurant's thank you to us for bringing in such a large group for lunch. There was an Afghan restaurant where we would now and then run into some of our Farsi translators. Even the likelihood of being approached by pesky translators wanting to intervene on behalf of their Iranian visa applicant clients wasn't enough to keep us away from the restaurant because the food was so good.

Image of Maultaschen with asparagus
by Butaris, via Flickr.com

The German restaurants in Stuttgart were also wonderful. Each one not only served delicious Schwabian cuisine, such as Spaetzle and Maultaschen with veal, pork beef, or chicken, but also were tastefully appointed so that it felt more like being in someone's home for a meal than out in a restaurant.

One evening when three of my colleagues from German language days came down to Stuttgart from Bonn, a group from the consulate joined us and we all went out to one of my favorite German restaurants. It was at that point that I realized how different the menu choices were in southern Germany than they were in northern Germany. Since all three of them had spent most of six months in German language classes with me, I knew that their German language skills were at least on par with mine, but they all seemed unfamiliar with the menu options. Or maybe the restaurants in Bonn had English translations for everything like I saw in Frankfurt. Stuttgart wasn't that Americanized.

Michael mentioned that the only food he really didn't like was liver which he knew was Leber in German so he picked something he knew wasn't liver. Janice then mentioned that the only food she couldn't eat was kidneys. She picked something with chicken. I probably had Maultaschen, something light and full of flavor that would leave room for dessert.

When the meals came, the conversation continued, but Michael was unexpectedly quiet, clearly not enjoying his meal. Janice asked him what was wrong and he said his meal was liver, in spite of the fact that there was no reference to Leber in the name. Janice offered to switch meals with him because she liked liver. It was a generous gesture which Michael accepted. Then it was Janice's turn to become quiet. As the rest of us continued to eat and converse, Janice sat quite still until the waitress came by and she asked if she could see the menu again. When the waitress returned with the menu, Janice brought it to me to ask if I knew what the item Michael ordered was. The word, Niere, wasn't familiar to her. And while it wasn't in my active vocabulary, I did understand it because I learned it by association - it is an anagram of reine, which means cleans. And that is precisely what the kidneys do - they remove wastes from blood. It turns out there are two foods Michael didn't like - liver and kidneys - and he couldn't tell the difference.

By this time, the rest of us had already tucked away enough of our meals that there wasn't really much of an option for one of us to make the same offer as Janice had to trade meals. But this wasn't a problem. The waitress noticed that Janice wasn't eating her meal, so she offered to bring her something else at no charge. What had started out looking like it might just be an example of a less than excellent restaurant turned out instead to be yet another example of an excellent restaurant. The food wasn't bad - it just wasn't what Michael or Janice had thought it was.

But I didn't just try out restaurants in Stuttgart. I traveled to Bonn to visit Janice and Michael. I traveled to Berlin where I visited a couple I had met in St. Paul, he German and she Romanian. I traveled to Munich to take part in the real Oktoberfest. I traveled throughout much of Baden-Wurtenberg with my friends Jan and Kathy who were in Germany on business. And I traveled in both Baden-Wurtenberg and Bavaria with my parents. In all of those places I eagerly tested my theory that there are no bad restaurants in Germany. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't find one.

Image of Oberammergau by Rita Willaert, via Flickr.com

The closest I came was a restaurant in Oberammergau where I stopped with my parents. That restaurant was unlike others. It was a huge hall instead of a cozy warren of small eating areas. The decor was more kitsch than cultural. There was also a tourist gift store next to the lobby. The food wasn't really bad - it was just mediocre. I could excuse Oberammergau for having a mediocre restaurant, just as I could understand why at least one of the restaurants in that town would look more like a college cafeteria than a restaurant. Every ten years Oberammergau is invaded by tourists who come for the Passion Play. Those tourists don't make their way to Oberammergau for the food, or for the gracious staff in the hotels or restaurants. The play's the thing.

I didn't stop looking for a bad restaurant in Germany once I found a mediocre one. But my search was a failure - except for all the good food and all the great hospitality I was shown during my ventures.

Day 188 - The Day the Shuttle Blew Up

Image of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion
by MATEUS_27:24&25, via Flickr.com

I knew from my experiences living in Iran before I joined the Foreign Service that it was essential that I find an activity outside of work. In Iran, I joined the German School Orchestra. In Germany, I joined the Metropolitan Club, a social organization for those between 18 and 35. I was pushing that upper limit, had in fact already slipped over it, but I could see many members were similiarly over that line and I wanted to contribute by joining instead of just taking part in their programs.

The Metropolitan Club wasn't a place. It was a group of people who organized activites that took place every Tuesday, most Thursdays, and many weekends. Weekend events included trips to the Bavarian Alps for cross-country skiing in the winter and for hiking in the summer, for example. Weekday evening meetings included lectures, tours of museums, meals in local restaurants, whatever the member organizing the event wanted to do. Because the group met so often, I could take part regularly even if I had to work late one or two evenings a week. In fact, often on the days of Metropolitan Club meetings, I worked late anyway since the meetings either included or followed the evening meal. If the meetings weren't at a specific location such as a restaurant or museum, they were held in the American Cultural Center, a few blocks away from the consulate building.

Meetings were conducted in English, not German, although the majority of members were German.

On Tuesday, January 28, 1986, I decided to stay in the office after close of business because I planned to attend a Metropolitan Club meeting that evening. I was sitting at the one Wang terminal that the entire visa section shared, when the Marine on duty came into the office and told me that the space shuttle Challenger had blown up on take-off. We didn't have TVs in our offices, so all we could do to find out more was to turn on a radio and tune in Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS). I don't remember what the program at the Metropolitan Club was that evening. We mostly sat around and talked about what a tragedy the loss of the shuttle was.

That evening, I went home looking forward to a phone call from Thom, a friend in Minneapolis who called me every Wednesday morning, Tuesday evening his time, because I knew the Challenger disaster would be a bigger blow to him than to anyone else I knew. Thom was a space exploration junkie. While we worked together as software engineers in the Minneapolis area, Thom wore a NASA jumpsuit to work on the day of every previous shuttle mission launch. His ex-wife had baked a cake in the shape of the shuttle for him to share with the rest of the engineers on April 12, 1981, the day of the first shuttle launch. Thom was a real engineer, trained in physics and computer science. He had worked for Honeywell on defense projects before joining the company both he and I later worked for as software engineers. But I never thought of myself as an engineer. Whenever I heard someone say something like, "Oh, you engineers are all alike," I would turn around and look behind me to see who they were talking about. I was an engineer by chance. Thom was an engineer down into his bones. The loss of Challenger was going to mean he would need to talk.

And so it did. But he didn't call me on Wednesday morning, as he usually did. And he didn't call me on Thursday morning. I realized that there must be someone else with him, someone else for him to talk with about the loss of the Challenger.

I left Minneapolis to join the Foreign Service at least in part because Thom didn't ask me to stay.  I had sought the opportunity for so long, but my life had continued in the meantime, making me uncertain whether I still wanted it. But Thom's decision not to ask me to stay meant that if I turned down the opportunity, it was likely that our relationship would end anyway. It was frustrating to realize that it didn't matter what I decided, the result would probably be the same in at least that one regard. But after I made the decision to accept the offer with State, Thom and I stayed together and talked about how we could remain connected even with the separation of distance. Our Wednesday morning telephone calls were one way we kept connected.

I waited until Friday morning to call him. And when the phone rang, Beth answered. Beth was the girlfriend of Thom's best friend, Bob. They lived in Ohio, and they had visited Thom the summer before, so my first hopeful thought was that Bob and Beth were in town again. That would explain why Thom hadn't called me the morning after the shuttle blew up. And it would explain why Beth had answered the phone. So I hoped.

When I got home from work on Friday, Thom called and admitted that Beth had now been living with him for the past month. He had always placed his Tuesday evening-in-Minneapolis / Wednesday morning-in-Stuttgart calls to me from a room where Beth wasn't so she wouldn't overhear our conversations. So while Beth knew me, she didn't necessarily know that Thom hadn't ended the relationship - or at least that I didn't know Thom had moved on. That was the last phone call I received from Thom.

And that is the story of what the day the space shuttle Challenger blew up meant to me, the closing of the door through which I could have returned to Minneapolis and recognizing I had to face the open door of my State Department future head on, instead of in half-hearted bursts.

Day 187 - Paul's Story

Sandra and Paul at the Marine Ball, 1986

The local employees at the consulate in Stuttgart were nothing like I had been led to believe. In ConGen Rosslyn, the several-week-long consular training program the preceded my departure for Germany, the instructor kept telling me that I wouldn't have to remember everything covered in the couse because the local employees in Germany had all been working there since right after the end of World War II, so they knew everything. I would only have to make decisions and then sit back and let them do the work.

If I had been heading off to Germany five years earlier, he probably would have been right. But sll those local employees who started working right after World War II ended were my parents' age and that meant they had nearly all retired. Instead of a well experienced local staff of elderly Germans, the local employees when I arrived were much younger than I had expected and much more diverse.

In addition to Germans, there were British citizens working at the consulate. One of them was Paul.

It was difficult to know whether or not to believe Paul. He had been in Germany for many years. He claimed he landed in Germany just after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia where he had been part of the film crew for the movie "Bridge at Remagen." The location selected for that World War II film was in Czechoslovakia in part because the West Germans wouldn't permit the filming on the Rhein because of the disruption it would cause to river traffic. The cost of filming in eastern Europe was much lower than in western Europe while the geography and climate were similar. When the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, the film crew had to leave the country hastily in taxis. That much is true. But whether Paul was one of those in the taxi was difficult for Paul to prove or anyone else to refute. Paul told that story to explain why he was no longer in the movie biz.

Once in Germany, he stayed, although he made frequent trips back to his home in Devon where he picked up antiques to bring to Germany to sell. I think his explanation alao had to do with World War II. Many Germans lost so many of their possessions during the war that there were few antiques in Germany. What Paul could pick up in England included many French and German items, so it was profitable for him to bring things across the channel.

By the time I met Paul, the number of sources for antiques in Devon of the value and size he could easily import had dwindled, but he was still involved in the antique business as much as he could be, although his antiques were more often recently manufactured in his own apartment.

Paul found that printers' blocks, especially the very large capital letters that often begin the first word of a chapter in old books, were popular in Germany. They weren't very large or very costly, so when Paul was able to bring in a new supply from England, he did very well at the weekend antique fairs. In order to keep himself supplied, he made molds of the original printers' blocks and then created new ones with plastic that he then glued to wood blocks and painted the plastic a metalic color and the blocks black. A black coat over the metalic color, wiped off before they dried gave the blocks the impression of having been used in a printing press.

I don't think Paul ever claimed that his blocks were antiques. The cost wasn't high so everyone involved in the transactions walked away satisfied. Whether or not Paul accounted for his weekend income with the tax authorities of either country is something I chose not to explore.

Paul was a story teller. One story, in addition to the tale of the filming of the Bridge at Remagen, was one I heard him tell many times.

Because German stores were only open weekends and Saturday mornings, except for langer Samstag or long Saturday when they stayed open until late afternoon, the shops in the train station were about the only place for someone who didn't have access to the American PX or Commissary on a Sunday. One Sunday afternoon, Paul went to the train station to pick up some food items from the coffee shop. He decided he would also like a cup of coffee and a pastry. When he picked up his coffee and pastry and all the packages he had purchased, he saw that there were no available tables, but there was a table with two chairs and just one person seated at it, reading a newspaper. Paul asked the man there if he could join him and the man nodded his agreement.

It was one of those round cocktail-height tables with very little room for more than two coffee cuos in saucers with tall stools. The other man's hat was on the table, making it challenging for Paul to put his coffee and other things in his hand on the table. Once he had done that, Paul bent over to get his packages situated on the floor next the stool. Once he stood up and sat down, he took his first sip of coffee when the man across from him picked up Paul's pastry and took a bite. Paul was stunned. The man hadn't even put down his newspaper.

After a moment, Paul moved the napkin with the pastry right next to his coffee cup. Paul waited until the other man turned the page of the paper so the he could see Paul as he picked up his pastry and took a bite. The other man caught Paul's eye and held it for a moment, his face stone-rigid. The then reached across the table and picked up the pastry and took another bite. Paul could hardly believe his eyes. He waited again until the man was about to turn the page of his newspaper when Pauk again picked up the pastry and took a bite.

At that point, the other man folded his paper up, put his hat on, all the while looking Paul straight in the eyes, and stormed away from the table, without saying a word. Paul picked up the remaining bite of his pastry, put his hand into his pocket to pull out change in order to leave a tip on the table. In addition to change, he pulled out his pastry, wrapped in the napkin, just as it had been handed to him at the counter.

At that point, everyone in the audience would laugh along with Paul. It was his story.

After I had heard the story a few times, I was listening to a cassette version of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to thr Galaxy when I heard Paul's story, nearly word for word the same, told by Arthur Dent or Ford Prefect, I can't remember which. I had finally caught Paul telling tales. But I couldn't get him to budge. I told him I knew where he had heard or read his story of the pastry, and he looked at me like I was from the moon. He insisted it was his story. So I played the cassette for him - just the part with the story in it. He insisted that Douglas Adams had stolen his story. Nothing would make him admit that he had appropriated the story as his own,

Do I believe Paul's story was real? No. Do I believe Paul was part of the film crew for Bridge at Remagen? No. Does it really matter? No. Now Paul's story is one of my stories.

Day 185 - A Trip to the Country

Image of Strasbourg
by Nouhailler, via Flickr.com

Stuttgart is very near France. So close, in fact, that traveling for lunch to the city of Strasbourg, the capital and principal city of the Alsace region in eastern France and the official seat of the European Parliament, was reasonable. And Strasbourg was unique in that it was possible to have an excellent French meal in a restaurant where the waiters spoke English and we could pay the bill with German marks.

I discovered escargot in Strasbourg.

I traveled with my neighbor Tim often. When John, a new consular officer - a third junior officer whose arrival had been delayed by weeks - arrived in Stuttgart, Tim suggested that he and I along with the other consular officer, David, and his wife take John to Strasbourg to celebrate. In addition to offering excellent food, Strasbourg is very picturesque with many pleasant and comfortable walking paths. We spent a full day in Strasbourg and returned in the evening.

On Monday, our boss pointed out how our decision to all travel to Strasbourg on the weekend left the Stuttgart consular district without a vice consul to respond to any consular emergency. We hadn't given it a thought. The consulate had a duty roster and none of us were on duty that weekend, so we thought we were all free to leave town. But most emergencies brought to the attention of the duty officer are consular emergencies. Lost passports, visas that must be issued on the weekend to facilitate travel that just can't wait, lost Americans, arrested Americans - these things only seemed to happen after hours or on the weekend.

The boss was right. We never all traveled together again.

But I took every opportunity to continue traveling to Strasbourg. The visit of a former colleague from Minnesota, TJ, gave me another opportunity. France had just introduced the requirement for American citizens to have visas when entering the country. It was such a new requirement that TJ wasn't aware of it when he left the U.S. on his European business trip. When he called me to let me know he was in the area and mentioned that he was next going to France, I asked if he already had a French visa. That was how he learned he would need one. His flight to Paris was scheduled for the following Monday, leaving him no time to apply for one. So I suggested he drive from Frankfurt to Stuttgart so that we could travel to Strasbourg by car on Saturday for lunch since the French issued visas to those crossing the border by road at the border crossing. That way, we would have a wonderful lunch, a pleasant walk around the town, and TJ would have his visa for his flight to Paris on Monday.

Later I learned that TJ had a bit of an argument when he arrived in Paris as the visa issued at the border on our trip into Strasbourg was for a single entry. So our trip to Strasbourg for lunch hadn't solved TJ's visa problem, at least not the way I had thought. He was allowed to enter France anyway, having explained why he thought he already had a visa, with his passport as evidence.

Day 184 - The Man From TTPI

Image of TTPI license plate bywoody1778a,
via Flickr.com

My most memorable passport applicant was Miguel,* a service member who was referred to us from the consulate in Frankfurt. Of the nine consulates in Germany, only Frankfurt processed immigrant visas. Miguel joined the Army when a recruiter from Guam visited his home on one of the islands in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI). The TTPI was a UN protectorate that had been administered since 1947 by the United States. Miguel didn't need a passport or a green card when he entered the U.S. because military members travel on their orders and his orders then were for him to complete basic training and then be assigned to Germany where he had been for the past three years.

During that time, he married a German woman with two children. He had gone to the consulate in Frankfurt to apply for immigrant visas for his wife and children because he was being reassigned to the U.S. He knew that his wife and children needed passports and immigrant visas. He didn't realize he couldn't sponsor them because he himself was neither a citizen nor a permanent resident. That is why Frankfurt sent him to Stuttgart for his family to apply for non-immigrant visas. When they appeared in the visa section, their applications were denied because they expected to remain in the U.S. with Miguel.

Miguel was understandably upset because of the runaround he was getting. Fortunately, his timing was perfect. We had just received a telegram from Washington about the end of the U.S. administration of the Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands, making way for the islands that made up the TTPI to determine whether they wanted independence or to form a different type of association with the U.S. Until the islands made their decision, the residents of the islands had the option to apply for U.S. citizenship, provided they didn't have claim on the citizenship of another country. Determining that latter condition was something that could only be done by headquarters in Washington. My job was to gather the information from Miguel that Washington needed to do the research. I also had to advise that he probably wouldn't be able to bring his family with him right away and suggested he find a place they could stay.

Questions that I thought would be easy for him to answer turned out not to be so easy. But that didn't mean that I disbelieved him. I never felt he was trying to hide anything from me. The questions were just hard for him to answer.

Miguel explained that he joined the Army in order to get away from his home because he saw everyone around him showing no initiative, with many men choosing to drink all night and sleep all day. He knew he didn't want that type of life, so he left it all behind. As a result, he wasn't sure of what his birth date was, or at least he couldn't provide me with evidence in the form of a birth certificate or a baptismal certificate because he wasn't sure that his parents had them or would get around to getting a new copy. I told him he should call his family to ask. He said he had already tried and had been waiting for months. He didn't expect to get an answer. He gave me the information he could and I sent my report to Washington. I told him to call in a week. He told me he was being transferred to the States in a week. I told him to come back the day before he had to leave to find out if I had an answer by then.

The day he came back was the day after I received a response. The sticking point had been that one of his grandparents was Korean. Miguel's answers had to go to the Embassy in Seoul for them to do the research. I don't remember the details, but I remember the result: Miguel had no claim to Korean citizenship so if he wanted to claim American citizenship, he qualified. I sent Miguel out to get passport photos so I could put together his American passport. With that in his hand, he could apply for immigrant visas for his wife and children.

I will never forget the look on Miguel's face when I handed him his passport. He opened the passport, looked at his photo, and a smile crossed his face from ear to ear as he looked up at me and said "Thanks."

Then I smiled. For the rest of the day.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 182 - A Tisket, A Tasket, Oops, I Lost It

Image of sign on a bus by Lodigs, via Flickr.com

The majority of non-routine passport cases involved reports of lost passports and requests for replacements. Some were true reports. Some were not. Of the latter, some were trivial. Some were not.

I relied on my gut reaction to the initial report of the loss to decide which cases to question further. Like so many of my German visa applicants, many Americans also were not good liars. The first clue was when answers to questions were vague or included too many "I don't remember" responses. When the person on the other side of the counter could give a credible and more or less complete description of the last time he was aware he still had the passport and a logical explanation for when it was lost, I didn't ask a lot of additional questions. If the person reporting the lost passport had already reported the loss to the police, I had even fewer questions. But when the answers were overwhelmingly "I don't remember," and no report of the loss was filed with the police, I kept asking questions, pointing out that my questions were to jog her memory to help find it.

One rash of reports of lost passports arrived from high school students in the early spring. It was like a minor epidemic at a school. Everyone seemed to have lost their passports and needed replacements. The first case probably seemed normal with the likely outcome that we issued a replacement passport. But by the third report, things started sounding fishy. As I asked additional questions, more and more "I don't remember" answers came up. It was clear the persons requesting replacement passports were trying to hide something. In one case, after I asked my questions and sent the young woman away with instructions that she should look a little harder before coming back to request a replacement, she left, but only for a short time. She returned to explain why she had asked for a new passport.

Her class, she explained, was taking a trip to East Germany and they were planning to travel by bus. But she was the daughter of a U.S. service member which meant she had a status of forces agreement, or SOFA, stamp in her passport. The status of forces agreement outlined the rights and responsibilities of U.S. service members and their family members while in Germany. One of the responsibilities was to limit travel between West Germany and West Berlin to three routes - one by air, one by train, and one by one highway. The young woman's class trip would not follow one of those routes. So she thought she would get a second passport without a SOFA stamp. Someone had told her all she needed to do was say she had lost hers and she could get a new one.

I was probably more bureaucratic than sympathetic in my response. I pointed out that those covered by the status of forces agreement had responsibilities as well as rights. The bottom line - I wouldn't issue a second passport to her.

Other reports of lost passports appeared to be less benign. Another group of lost passports was reported by former U.S. service members who were living in the Mannheim area. We suspected that passports were being sold. And there were still active underground terrorist groups in Europe, so the thought of U.S. passports in the hands of the Red Army Faction was unpleasant at best.

One man who reported his passport lost was most memorable for the contrast between all of his "I can't remembers" and the full details he could recall when I asked clarifying questions. For example, he couldn't remember where he last used his passport although it was within the past month. He traveled a lot for his job as a logistics specialist. Maybe it was when he traveled to France, or maybe it as to Switzerland.  I pointed out that the French government had only recently introduced the requirement that American citizens had to have visas to travel to France. My conversation with him went something like this:

"Have you ever applied for a French visa," I asked.

"No," he responded.

"Then I think it is unlikely that you last used your passport on a trip to France. Maybe it was when you traveled to Switzerland." I suggested.

"I didn't need to get a visa for France," he countered with just a bit of a challenge in his voice, "because I traveled by train. They issue visas to passengers on the train at the border."

It was amazing how well he remembered some details, but not others.

The interview window in the American Citizen Services section was within line of sight for the Marine on duty in the consular waiting room. While I was interviewing this man with two contrasting memories, the phone on the desk near me rang. The applicant had raised his voice so loudly that the Marine wanted to know if I needed help. I declined the offer and explained to the applicant, again, that in cases such as his, I advise looking harder for his lost passport before returning to apply for a replacement again.

He didn't return. But he did write a letter to the Consul complaining about my refusal to issue a replacement passport in which he exhibited his superior powers of observation as he described me, the color of my dress, and my matching shoes - shoes that he couldn't see while at the interview window. When my boss read the letter, she agreed that his letter just further undermined his credibility as the contrast between the details he chose to recall and those he couldn't was so dramatic.

Day 181 - The Weiss Brothers

After a year working in the Visa Section, I moved to the American Citizen Services Section where the majority of the work involved issuing passports and reports of birth abroad to family members of service members in Germany. Once again, like visa applications, most of these cases were straight forward. But a few were interesting.

The Weiss brothers were definitely interesting.

Image of cowboys by DangerRanger,
via Flickr.com

The two brothers showed up wearing cowboy hats, cowboy boots, and big smiles, requesting that we arrange to repatriate them back to the U.S. because they had run out of money. But the kicker was that they had previously been repatriated back to the U.S. from Stuttgart and their explanation for why we should do it again was that they hadn't yet repaid the repatriation loan from that first occassion three or five years before. They had copies of the paperwork to prove it.

The brothers were Amcits, State-speak for American citizens, but they spoke English with an accent that suggested an eastern European background. Russian was my guess.

The reason their case was interesting is that the brothers shouldn't have been issued new passports until after they had repaid the previous loan. When U.S. citizens are repatriated, their passports are annotated to expire when they arrive back in the U.S. and a hold is placed on any new applications until the loan to cover the cost of repatriation has been repaid. Repatriation is intended to be a last resort for Americans in trouble overseas. Even people who are evacuated out of dangerous places such as Tehran in February of 1979 end up with a bill for a representative cost of their last-minute flight out if town. Let that be a lesson to you if you were thinking of taking an adventure vacation in one of the world's hot spots, assuming the USG, that is how we refer to the United States Government in State-speak, will bail you out.

So the Weiss brothers showing up, claiming they were broke and needed to be repatriated again in spite of the fact that they still owed the government for the earlier trip home, was interesting. The first question to answer was how they got those passports. And that required sending a message back to Washington to verify that the passports were legitimate.

They were. All we got as an explanation was that someone made a mistake when the new passports were issued. So we decided we needed to dig deeper. Since the original case was several years old, that meant digging into our files in the basement. We explained to the brothers that they would have to come back in a few days.

They were impatient, so they came back earlier than we were ready to give them an answer. And this time, they brought their parents. They were not U.S. citizens, so they had no passports. They also didn't have the same last name. Theirs was definitely Slavic, perhaps Russian. They were permanent residents, green card holders, who had reentry permits. These are travel documents issued to permanent residents who have a legitimate reason to be out of the U.S. for an extended period of time. The boys informed us that they wanted their parents to be repatriated as well. Now that posed a few problems because repatriation isn't extended to non-citizens, even those with green cards. But we collected their reentry permits and photocopied all the pages, at the strong recommendation of my boss. It turned out to be a very good step since there were pages missing from both of those documents. That led us to look more closely at the brothers' passports. They were also missing a few pages. The boys claimed they had been in Germany only a few weeks, but missing pages suggested there may be something bigger they wanted to hide.

After interviewing the brothers again, asking a long series of questions regarding where they had been since they left the U.S., I sent a second report to Washington with their explanation for their predicament, along with a summary of their previous repatriation file and their request that we repatriate their parents as well. I also copied the other consulates in Germany in order to find out if the brothers had previously appeared anywhere else to request assistance.

We received approval to repatriate the brothers, but the addition of the parents complicated things.  The brothers complicated things even more. In spite of the likelihood that we would not receive approval to pay for the parents' return, the boys kept upping the ante. They insisted that we repatriate them via ship instead of by plane because, they said, their parents were afraid to fly.

By this time, it seemed clear that they knew we weren't going to repatriate all four of them, and that we wouldn't agree to send them back by boat. But they had started the process, so they had to follow through. The smiles on their faces gave away that they were just playing a game. Or so I thought.

Image of Mercedes Benz by pilot_micha, via Flickr.com

As suddenly as they appeared, they disappeared. They never returned to find out if we would book their return via ship. But we did hear more about them later. They turned up at another consulate in Germany. I think they had a new story and a new request. The details are not in my memory. What I do remember is that the brothers and their parents had been sleeping in two brand new Mercedes Benz vehicles which they probably purchased in Stuttgart, the heart of Mercedes Benz manufacturing.

They must have run out of money before they could ship them to the U.S.

Day 179 - More Prison Blues

Another American I visited in a German prison, Mark,* was charged with a much more serious offense - murder. He explained to me that went out one night to a bar, drank so much that his memory was blank for a portion of the evening. He didn't remember meeting a woman in the bar. He didn't remember taking her home. And he didn't remember murdering her. He had no memory of the woman. He really, really didn't think he should be charged with murder when he couldn't remember what happened to him. I don't know how he would have felt about a guilty by reason of loss of memory option. What he really wanted was not to be charged because he couldn't remember. But he had been found guilty. I had a hard time feeling much sympathy for him, but it was important for me not to let him know how I felt.

I visited Mark more than once. My responsibility was entirely to make sure he wasn't being mistreated and that he had access to legal representation. I wasn't his advocate in the legal system, just as a American citizen in prison. But he didn't fit the image of a hardened criminal. He was a former GI who was stationed in Germany where he met his wife so that he stayed in Germany with her after he got out of the Army. He didn't claim to have any problems with his wife. He claimed he wasn't having an affair. He claims that he only remembers going out for a few beers.

Later, he was arrested, tried, and convicted for murder.

Now this is a time when the curious person in me would have asked him a lot of questions about what happened, to be able to at least describe, if not solve, the mystery. But taking the conversation in that direction might look to Mark as though I was there to help his defense. So instead our conversations were short, focused on how he was doing. He didn't spend most of his time in a cell, unlike what TV programs show. Instead, he, like all other prisoners, had time to watch TV, read books, as well as working in the prison.

There were going to be a lot of consular officers in the future who would end up visiting Mark in prison. Maybe they still are.

The third American I recall visiting in prison was also a former GI, Jerome*, who remained behind in Germany, although I don't recall whether he also married a German. I learned more from him about the circumstances of life in prison from him since he had many complaints about his treatment. Jerome described the work he did at the prison for which he earned a small amount of money. His complaint was that he couldn't buy what he needed in the shop where his earnings could be used because they did not stock products for African hair. My boss usually picked up the products she knew he wanted and gave them to him, through me.

I don't know, or don't remember, anything more about Jerome's circumstances. I think that means I was doing my job, assessing whether he was being treated well without getting involved in any way.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 178 - Jailhouse Blues

An occasional responsibility for consular officers involved visits to American citizens in prison. Fortunately, these were rare in Germany. Even more fortunately, German prisons are much nicer than prisons in many other parts of the world.

Image of prison by kIM DARam, via Flickr.com

During my training for consular work, we did a lot of role playing. The location was Congen Rosslyn, the name given to the suite of offices that were set up to look a lot like what we would find when we arrived on the job. Rosslyn was a section of Arlington County in Virginia where most of the Foreign Service Institute's courses were held at the time I arrived in Washington. Congen Rosslyn took its name from the location, but it was transformed into the capital of the mythical country of Z. During our role playing, one of us would act as the prisoner, one as the consular officer, and the course instructor and the other ConGen students would observe. At the conclusion of the role playing exercise, we would discuss the scenario. The consular officer and prisoner role players would describe how they felt during the exercise and the observers commented on whether they thought the scenario would have a positive outcome if the situation had been real.

I was surprised that my fellow classmates all commented on how cool and detached I appeared during the role playing. I thought I was being very sympathetic.

When I made my first prison visit, I didn't have the benefit of an observer to let me know afterwards how I did, except that I had to write up a report to send to Washington to ensure headquarters knew we were fulfilling our obligation towards imprisoned Americans.

The first American I visited, Bruno,* was born in Germany of a German mother and an American citizen father. At the time he was born, Germany did not consider the children of German mothers to be German citizens; Germany considered that a child's citizenship was derived through the father. In Bruno's case, his father was American of Yugoslav origin. The importance of this detail comes later.

Bruno was in prison because he had overstayed his visa in Germany. He had grown up in Germany, so he considered himself German, not American. He barely spoke English and that fact meant that he often was thought to be carrying a false passport when the police stopped him for one thing or another and he handed over his American passport as his proof of identification. His mother had died, so he was living on his own in Germany, unable to get German citizenship through a change in the law that might have made it possible for him to take advantage of a provision for certain German women to petition on behalf of their children to obtain German citizenship in spite of their fathers not being German. His mother would have had to petition on his behalf, and she wasn't there. His father also wasn't in Germany. He had returned to the United States where he was prepared to welcome Bruno in spite of the fact that he had done so once before when Bruno had been deported from Germany, but Bruno hadn't adjusted well to life in the United States so he returned to Germany. And that led to his overstaying his visa, being found in the country without permission and then put into prison. Bruno was facing deportation to the United States for a second time.

Bruno thought the solution to his problem would be to renounce his American citizenship. According to his thinking, if he wasn't an American citizen, he couldn't be deported, so he would be able to stay in Germany. He would have to apply for a Stateless person's travel document, but that was preferable to being deported. But Bruno wasn't considering his father's situation clearly enough. His father, though an American citizen, was also very likely also a Yugoslav citizen. There are many countries in the world which do not consider it possible for its citizens to stop being a citizen. Since his father was born in Yugoslavia to parents who were both Yugoslav citizens, the Yugoslav government might consider both his father, and through his blood line also Bruno, to be Yugoslav citizens. If Bruno renounced his American citizenship, he couldn't be deported to the United States. But the German government might instead decide to deport him to Yugoslavia, a country where he knew no one, where the language was completely unfamiliar to him, and where his life would likely be much more difficult than it was in Germany or had been for the year he spent in the United States.

My mission was to meet with Bruno and talk with him about the consequences of renouncing his citizenship. While my boss didn't tell me outright that my job was to talk him out of renouncing his citizenship, it seemed clear that she thought Bruno would be better off being deported to the United States than giving up his citizenship and not having any control at all over what happened next.

Since Bruno's English was very weak, he and I talked about his situation in German. I asked him questions and listened to his answers. I didn't tell him what I thought he should do. I just asked him questions, hoping he would come to his own decision not to renounce his citizenship. I was very pleased at the end of the visit when Bruno agreed that he would not insist on renouncing his citizenship.

When I returned to the Consulate, I happily reported the results of my meeting with Bruno to my boss. She just smiled. At the end of my story, she admitted that Bruno always changed his mind by the end of a consular prison visit. She said I had done a good job. But I walked away knowing that the next consular officer would probably have to go through the same conversation with Bruno, unless the German government finally deported him in the meantime.